Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I want you to stay

    There's been two songs I can remember in the past twenty years or so that have gotten so violently enmeshed in my emotions that I can hardly bear to listen to them. I don't think they're anything more than pretty good songs on their own, but the associations have felt extreme.

    The first, which I've been free of for years, is Bon Iver's "Skinny Love". I remember listening to it and other Bon Iver songs like 17 years ago while laying on the floor of my basement apartment while my girlfriend was out of town, and I was just so completely, calmly, confidently in love in a finally-everything-is-coming-together way. The relationship unraveled a few years later very publicly and painfully and maybe that song even played at a particularly inopportune time during the teardown -- I can't actually remember -- but holy shit was that song tarnished. I also can't remember exactly what changed my feelings on it -- it's not that I *like* the song now. I mostly tune it out if it comes on, but it's definitely moved out of soul-crushing pain and into annoyance, which is a major improvement. I think the cover by Birdie helped, which I didn't hear until many many years after it came out. Just time. New associations. New singer.

  • 16 & 17 January 2026

    What a night... Junior was seemingly hit with some incarnation of a nasty gastrointestinal bug and spend the bigger part of the night vomiting. I cannot recall how often we changed his clothes, our clothes, the bed sheets... luckily he did drink between the vomiting so we at least had not to fear THAT much that everything gets out of control. About 04:00 in the morning the vomiting stopped, we spend the following three to four hours somewhat asleep but carefully listening to any weird sound that may come from Junior.

    In the morning my wife called in for paternal sick leave at her job and i just took a day off in anticipation of a day filled with caring for a sick and possibly vomiting child. But the moment he did wake up he was fine, fresh as he would have slept the whole night and happy that both parents stay at home to play with him. Just to be sure we did a short visit at our local doctor but after a short examination of Junior he told us that everything is ok.

  • Lets Not

    Hey y'all, in 2026, lets not start a conversation with someone we've never met with "where are you from?" and then try guessing where they're from when the person doesn't want to answer.

    I was recently in an environment where I was with my girlfriend and a bunch of men came up to her and, nine times out of ten, tried starting a conversation with her by asking where she was from. It was infuriating for her and truly the most low-effort attempt at starting a conversation.

  • New year Review: what is in and what is out for 2026

    I am returning to my blog after a month long hiatus, and while we are well into the new year.

    I keep saying I would like to come back here and write updates more often, but then I never do it. Yet I know this is something I would like to do, so I will make the time and put more effort into it.

    After all, this is mainly a way for me to document my life, so who cares if my updates will be a little boring and not very creative at times. Right?

    I don't necessarily make "New Year Resolutions", but I do have "resolutions", in the sense that I have goals and things I strive for, a need for something to push me to avoid repeating the same year over and over again.

  • The Joy of Unexpected Quiet

    This weekend we were supposed to be looking after a friend's dog. The dog is a corgi, a barker (maybe that goes without saying), easily startled, and, once it starts barking, takes forever to stop. We look after their dog because they're our friends,`and because they look after ours when we need it. But it's not really something I look forward to, and while I like their dog, I'm always happy when they come to pick him up.

  • Abundant sunshine

    Two weeks in to 2026 and things have been quiet, if not busy. My first week back at work was awful with so many things coming up at once, but I think the dust has mostly settled now.

    We are lucky in Tokyo in that winters are quite mild. Yesterday it went up to 15c / 59f, which was nice. Today it's looking to go up to 13c / 55f and then go down again during the week, but not by much. We have abundant sunshine here just about every day, which is very welcome indeed. To those who are stuck in the snow and gloom and/or have Seasonal Affect, you have my sympathies.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Raising Notifications From Terminal

    When executing long-running jobs in the terminal, it's useful to get notified when they complete so you can do other things while waiting. Here are a few ways to achieve this.

    [...]

    If you've already started a long-running job and forgot to add a notification, you can still do it:

    1. Press `Ctrl-Z` to suspend the job and put it in the background

    2. Run `fg; notify-send "done"`

    The job will resume in the foreground, and you'll get notified when it finishes.

  • Programming

    • Environmental Sanity

      The best time to enforce what is in the environment is when a project begins, ass that way ideally everything will be reset and in a clean state when any child process begins. An already existing project is problematic to fix, as finding all uses of environment variables can be very difficult, especially if millions of lines of code have been written, and the risk is probably fairly high that some workflow will break if the environment is cleaned up and, say, PATH does not have what it needs, or some other variable is missing, and the reward fairly low as environment leaks or duplicated environment variables are likely a rare attack.

      Besides the "millions of lines of code and no time to audit" problem, reads from the environment can be difficult to detect. If you are lucky the code will only use getenv(3) calls, assuming C. Fancier languages will usually shoehorn the list of environment variables into a hash by one of at least two incompatible ways. In C one can also read from **environ, or worse code can process the environment without mentioning getenv or environ at all. This while rare may make auditing for 100% certainty difficult.